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Tuesday, July 22, 2014

I attended OSCON 2014 held in Portland, Oregon. I think Portland is the Mecca of Open Source because OSCON is held there every year and Intel Open Source Technology center is also in Hillsboro near Portland. In addition, Linus Torvalds is based in Portland.

I wanted to attend some sessions this year, but I didn't see many related to my job. There are more high level topics above system level. Anyway, it's great listening to web developers as a web engine developer.

OSCON is a bit different from other F/OSS conferences, which is aimed at the Web development, clouds, database, language, and hardware like Raspberry Pi and Arduino. So, there are no Linux kernel, GNOME/KDE, and other system level topics. I think that Guadec or FOSDEM is well suited for me.

Anyway, I really enjoyed the atmosphere of the F/OSS conference. I saw many hackers and geeks who were hacking around session rooms. There were many BoFs until 10PM.

Many companies that have open source solutions joined the Expo. They showed their solutions and services to visitors. Intel also showed a Crosswalk demo video with a web application running on Crosswalk controlling a drone remotely, which shows Crosswalk can talk to the device using JavaScript to communicate with each other over wireless networks. It was cool.

I had an opportunity to use Firefox OS. The device looks cheap, but the UI responsiveness is really good. I heard that it's just 150$, but it was released in some developing countries. I hope to see a Firefox OS phone in the major markets. I got lots of information from the Firefox OS session. The speakers introduced ways on how to develop Firefox OS applications and to use the development tools. It's quite interesting to know that Firefox OS applications can run in Firefox for Android.

I felt that I need to learn other areas to more enjoy talks in OSCON next year. :-)